Graceful Shutdown - CI/CD Glossary Definition

Graceful shutdown lets a process finish and clean up before it exits on SIGTERM.

Graceful shutdown is stopping a process cleanly on receiving a termination signal (SIGTERM): it finishes in-flight work, flushes buffers, and releases resources before exiting.

Graceful shutdown handles SIGTERM by winding down in order instead of dropping work. A process that ignores SIGTERM is later force-killed by SIGKILL.

In CI

When a runner is scaled down or a job is canceled, it receives SIGTERM first; a drain timeout later escalates to SIGKILL (exit 137) if the process has not exited.

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